Pointleaf Manzanita Arctostaphylos pungens
Pointleaf Manzanita is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 12 ft and blooms Feb in full sun – part shade, with red fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Arctostaphylos pungens, with the common name pointleaf manzanita, is a species of manzanita. It is native to the Southwestern United States and to northern and central Mexico, where it grows in chaparral and woodland habitats, and on desert ridges. Arctostaphylos pungens can be seen growing at Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico at an elevation of about 6000 feet. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.7–7
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 10+
- Height
- 12 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 10 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Red persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Winter – Spring seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Contract growing only
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~17 caterpillar species
Arctostaphylos supports ~17 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Arctostaphylos in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 2 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Arctostaphylos is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Pointleaf Manzanita :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Pointleaf Manzanita — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 199 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Pointleaf Manzanita, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Arctostaphylos →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (38) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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